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How to Reduce Energy Consumption, Waste, and Costs while Increasing Efficiency and ROI

Microsoft recognizes the tough challenges that data center managers, industry operators, and IT businesses face today as they struggle to support their businesses in the face of budget cuts and uncertainty about the future. It’s natural that environmental sustainability is taking a back seat in many companies at this time. But the fact is, being “lean and green” is good for both the business and the environment, and organizations that focus their attentions accordingly will see clear benefits. Reducing energy use and waste improves a company’s bottom line, and increasing the use of recycled materials is a proven way to demonstrate good corporate citizenship to your customers, employees, and the communities you do business in.

That said, it isn’t always easy to know where to begin in moving to greener and more efficient operations. With that in mind—along with Microsoft’s commitment to share best practices with the rest of the data center industry—this paper presents the top ten best business practices for environmentally sustainable data centers. The items in this list were submitted by senior members of Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS) Infrastructure Services team. Their backgrounds include expertise in server and chip development, data center electrical and mechanical engineering, power and cooling architecture and design, research and development, and business operations and administration.

Microsoft has followed the practices below for several years now and found that in addition to helping protect the environment, they lead to optimal use of resources and help teams stay aligned with core strategies and goals:

UNITED NATIONS - NATIONS UNIESTHE SECRETARY-GENERALMESSAGE ON WORLD WATER DAY22 March 2010

Water is the source of life and the link that binds all living beings on this planet. It is connected directly to all our United Nations goals: improved maternal and child health and life expectancy, women’s empowerment, food security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Recognition of these links led to the declaration of 2005-2015 as the International Decade for Action “Water for Life”.

Our indispensable water resources have proven themselves to be greatly resilient, but they are increasingly vulnerable and threatened. Our growing population’s need for water for food, raw materials and energy is increasingly competing with nature’s own demands for water to sustain already imperiled ecosystems and the services on which we depend. Day after day, we pour millions of tons of untreated sewage and industrial and agricultural wastes into the world’s water systems. Clean water has become scarce and will become even scarcer with the onset of climate change. And the poor continue to suffer first and most from pollution, water shortages and the lack of adequate sanitation.

The theme of this year’s World Water Day, “Clean Water for a Healthy World”, emphasizes that both the quality and the quantity of water resources are at risk. More people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war. These deaths are an affront to our common humanity, and undermine the efforts of many countries to achieve their development potential.

Filmmakers want to do more than create works that inform and illustrate the importance of sustainability: they want to incorporate sustainable, environmentally-friendly practices into their craft. Enter the Code of Best Practices in Sustainable Filmmaking, a new guide among the first of its kind to help filmmakers assess the carbon dioxide (CO2) footprints of their productions and find ways to reduce, neutralize, and offset them.

Please visit sustainablefilmmaking.org to read the Code of Best Practices in Sustainable Filmmaking and to learn more about its authors. As an additional resource, please see below The GreenCode for Filmmakers written by filmmaker Larry Engel.

Toward an Environmental Conscience:

The GreenCode for Filmmakers

Some steps to take in the field or on location to help the planet:

1. Water.Stop drinking bottled water. Drink tap water, filtered if you wish. Use nalgene bottles or camelback/platypus sacks. Bottled water is ridiculous. It’s not regulated so you don’t really know what’s in it or where it came from. The plastic bottles are not recycled in most places. The price of producing the bottles is high in terms of energy and therefore CO2 costs. And transportation of the bottles is an additional unnecessary cost to you and to the environment. Worse case, buy gallon jugs and refill nalgene bottles or one bottle per person -- use a sharpie to label names.

The Goldman Environmental Foundation has awarded the 2010 Goldman Environmental Prize to a group of six emerging leaders for their efforts in addressing some of the most pressing environmental problems affecting local communities and the planet.

This Year’s Winners

Thuli Brilliance Makama, Swaziland

Thuli Makama, Swaziland’s only public interest environmental attorney, won a landmark case to include environmental NGO representation in conservation decisions and continues to challenge the forced evictions and violence perpetrated against poverty-stricken communities living on the edges of conservation areas.

Malgorzata Górska led the fight to protect Poland’s Rospuda Valley, one of Europe’s last true wilderness areas, from a controversial highway project that would have destroyed the region’s sensitive ecosystems.

Asia has a diverse environment which is under growing pressure from population growth, economic development and climate change. The region now faces a number of challenges including deforestation, desertification and loss of biodiversity, meanwhile, inter-related issues, such as air and water pollution, waste management and rapid urbanisation also crowd the environment agenda.

The EU is committed to helping Asia protect its environment and to finding a sustainable future for the region’s growing economies. Environmental problems are rarely contained within national borders, which is why the EU has developed an approach to deal with them at regional level.

EC programmes in the environmental field

The Commission’s Regional Strategy Paper for EU-Asia Cooperation (2007-2013) has identified the environment as a sector in need of major support. Funding of about €102 million has been allocated for the strategy’s first four years, to be spent on implementing two programmes in Asia: SWITCH Asia which focuses on sustainable consumption and production (SCP) and FLEGT Asia which promotes sustainable forest management.